How a16zs American Dynamism turned defense tech into the hottest trade in Silicon Valley
This week, America put its military arsenal on full display — sinking Iranian warships, neutralizing thousands of missiles and drones, and executing strikes on a scale few thought possible.It was a reminder that our technological superiority is still unmatched.Behind that firepower is both a legacy arsenal decades in the making and a new generation of defense technology — built by Silicon Valley companies that are committed to the national interest.That’s partly thanks to Katherine Boyle and David Ulevitch, whose American Dynamism Fund, launched inside Andreessen Horowitz in 2022, was built on the conviction that investing in defense, aerospace, and manufacturing isn’t just inherently valuable and patriotic.
It’s also good business.In California’s deep-blue Bay Area that idea was deeply unfashionable.Just a few years earlier, Google had pulled out of Project Maven, a Pentagon contract to help analyze drone footage, after thousands of employees signed a petition objecting to military work.“We were sort of the lone crew of people saying these things are important,” Boyle told me.
“Founders were told there’s no reason to build in those categories — no one’s going to back you if you want to build a defense company or an aerospace company.”Fast forward four years and defense tech is arguably one of the hottest sectors in venture capital, with companies like SpaceX commanding an estimated valuation of $1.75 trillion, Anduril worth $60 billion, and Palantir with a nearly $370 billion market cap. Boyle, a former journalist who cold-emailed Peter Thiel to break into the industry, teamed up with David Ulevitch, who sold his cloud-based security company to Cisco in 2015 for $635 million.Fittingly, the two had met while both vying to invest in Anduril’s Series B. Last month they closed a second fund, bringing their total raised to $1.176 billion.
Other recent investments include Chariot Defense, which is focused on power architecture for the ba...